Saturday, March 24, 2012

Jesus, as a teacher, was primarily a man of action but in terms of
instruction it was his powerful parables and sermons that stand out in the
Gospels. Importantly, there is no sense of exclusion as he encourages shunned
lepers, hated tax inspectors, prostitutes, criminals and especially the poor, to
receive his message. Has there been any more radical and effective teacher? When
it came to powerful messages it was through his individual acts of love,
kindness and forgiveness that make their mark. However, there is much to learn
from how he taught.

Parables

Parables were not used by him to impose moral rules but to show,
by story-telling, how to act by listening to examples of how others have acted.
Jesus was clear about why he used them and why they worked, explaining this in
the Gospels. Parables are image rich and allow the listener or reader to
picture the scene and recall from episodic memory. They appeal to the illiterate
poor and have the power to change behaviour and lives. Christian art is full of
images that retell these parables, as most people across the ages were
illiterate.

Sermons

Jesus also used sermons, notably the Sermon on the Mount, to tell
his story and the sermon was to become the priest and preachers pedagogic
weapon for centuries to come. Paul the Apostle was the man who took
Christianity to the world, preaching in major cities and shaped the way
Christianity was to be spread and taught for the almost two millennia. From
Paul we get the read speech and authoritative sermon. This is not the Sermon on
the Mount but the proselytising sermon that we still hear from every pulpit,
priest and preacher to this day.

Sermon
to lecture

Given the hold religion had on educational institutions until
relatively recently, especially Universities, it is hardly surprising that the sermon
transmogrified into the ‘lecture’, which to this day, remains the main
pedagogic technique in Higher education. In education it moved from pulpit to
lectern. ‘Lectern’ means ‘reading desk’ and the word ‘lecture’, from the 14th
century meant ‘the act of reading’,
from the Latin ‘to read’. It was only
in the 16th century that this shifted to mean a talk for teaching a specific
topic or subject. The verb ‘to lecture’
is first recorded in 1590. This pre-print pedagogy remains the primary
pedagogic method in Higher Education, despite the overwhelming evidence that it
is inefficient and runs counter to almost everything we know about the
psychology of learning.

E-learning

We can learn from the power of parables, that attitudinal change
can come if we show exemplary behaviour in a way that is memorable, through
story-telling. This has been the power of YouTube, TED and video. We should
also remember that this is not the way to treat all forms of learning. In the
end it is through action that we learn to change ourselves. The point is not just
to look and listen but to act.

Conclusion

Has there been any more powerful teacher? His only rival is
perhaps the Buddha or Mohammed. This one man shaped two millennia of thought
and culture through the use of simple parables and sermons. These were to be
retold and evangelised by others such as Paul, and armies of preachers, to
congregations, largely in churches, that continues to this day. Note that some,
like Nietzsche, thought that this led to a two millennia aberration and, in
particular, a thousand years stultifying scholasticism. The religious influence
on pedagogy also meant that the sermon became the dull one hour lecture, which
still dominates much of our educational pedagogy today. This has held back
pedagogic progress rendering much higher education a slow, ponderous and too often
tedious affair. There is, of course, the threat to science posed by
fundamentalist Christianity, in its denial of evolutionary theory, especially
in the US. However, overall Christianity has more recently played a key role in
the provision of universal schooling.